Word: sordidness
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...sordid saga began in October 2001, when Ted Ammon, chairman of Jazz at Lincoln Center and a financier with a personal fortune estimated at $100 million, was found naked and bludgeoned to death in a bedroom in his ivy-covered mansion. Ammon, 52, was days away from signing divorce papers with Generosa, his wife of 15 years. The two were separated and battling over custody of their adopted Ukrainian twins, Alexa and Gregory, 11. At the time of the murder, Generosa was dating Pelosi, whom she met when he helped renovate her Manhattan town house. Pelosi had also installed...
JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL. In Hospital’s tightly plotted suspense novel Due Preparations for a Plague, two adults who survived the 1987 hijacking of an Air France flight by Iraqi Islamic Fundamentalists attempt to piece together the gruesome details. As the U.S.’s sordid role in the affair is uncovered, protagonists Lowell and Samantha work to bring their information to light and struggle with the emotional toll of digging into their pasts. Hospital reads from Due Preparations for a Plague on Tuesday, August 5 at 7:00 p.m. Wordsworth Books...
...Trouble in Bihar In the article "State of Fear" [June 30], you described the dire situation in the Indian state of Bihar. Thank you for shedding light on poverty and crime. The sordid fact that kidnapping for ransom is Bihar's biggest industry is a blemish on India. You reported that "even politicians may be cashing in." Although some local politicians may run kidnap syndicates, as one assembly member charged, the sorry state of affairs in Bihar is not solely the work of a few politicians; it is the result of the apathy of the Bihari people. They must rise...
What I found in Dubrave was not a monastery at all, but rather a sordid collection of hold-over clerics from the war. Two men with sagging faces (although they couldn’t have been more than 30 years old) and two elderly nuns whose arms were tattooed with crosses greeted me at the door. “Holy Christ,” I thought instinctively, partaking in their vacant stares, not quite realizing the irony of this thought amidst the devotional community of Dubrave...
...Breaking that siege is almost impossible in the face of endemic and systemic corruption. A few sordid examples: in certain colleges, teachers demand payoffs from students wanting to pass exams; some cops earn extra money by selling their bullets; and gangs, operating under the auspices of crooked bureaucrats, police and army-ranger elements, siphon off water before it reaches the taps of most Karachi apartment buildings and sell it in the city from tanker trucks, according to municipal workers. An industrialist who says he refused to bribe health inspectors saw his tiremaking plant shut down when they invoked a little...